Das Byte.
Technology is the practical manifestation of novelty in the universe
Terrence McKenna
When Thomas Piketty entered the global stage of celebrated economists, it was thanks to his extensive research on the nature of capital in modern economies. By proving that the rate of return on capital is greater than the rate of economic growth, he’s pointing at a bug that seems to be the reason of rising inequality: in modern capitalism it’s easier to make more money with money than working for it. There’s a negative feedback loop in our financial structures where the rich simply get richer. Capital was also the obsession of Karl Marx who entitled his most celebrated contribution to humanity after it: Das Kapital aims to describe the very dynamics that make such force possible.
Every kind of society manages a kind of energy it denominates wealth. Sometimes it consists of elements linked to knowledge (information), and sometimes to scarce resources (matter). And this energy is handled by taking two possible paths: wealth gets redistributed or wealth is generated. In the vision where the will of the colective trumps the individual, redistribution predominates. In those places where the virtue of the individual is praised, you get innovation: the creation of new spaces for wealth, hence wealth generation. Both tendencies have important benefits and serious flaws at the same time. These are forces that tend to find an equillibrium.
Those societies that take the colectivist route, get stagnated at the historical time when such decision was taken. Some glimpses of modernity can be found among their members but in the trascendental aspects of their culture, what catches the eye is the temporal similarity with the epoch they decided to get off from the arrow of progress. Cuba is a living postcard of the 60's; the Amish stopped their clocks in the XVIII century; the Masai Mara in Kenya connect us with thousands of years in the past. Every single branch in the great tree of mankind ends up finding shelter in a given time.
Except in societies that keep pushing for technological innovation. There, the future is fabricated as a consumable product in factories and software houses that keep pushing the barrier on what’s possible by piggybacking on the efforts of previous generations. In these places time doesn’t stop and technology keeps extending the metaphorical capabilities of language, shaping human consciousness with the element of novelty. At the pinnacle of these efforts, there’s the rise of digital information: a construction that bridges the gap between human ideas and machines. Such paradigm is what makes Moore’s Law possible: software assists in the design of better hardware that eventually leads to even better software, and so on. And it is this emergent push for innovation what makes capitalism actually work. In the same way that large sums of capital lead to greater sums of capital is that large amounts of digital capability lead to greater technology. Capitalism and technological innovation are two sides of a same coin. There isn’t one without the other one.
But capital is a limited representation of the financial performance of a given set of goods. The value it portrays is based on the cost for producing such goods plus the value these goods have in the market. Information on the other hand, helps to value an almost trascendental force: intelligence. As our computing, networking and storage capabilities for information increase, so does the capability of mankind to deliver answers for increasingly complex questions. While an industrial corporation is focused on efficiency to become valuable (less costs, better pricing), information-based industries are more prone to focus on delivering meaning (extract signal from noise).
Albert Einstein famously stated “two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity”. We can certainly grant him that unassisted intelligence is finite in humans. But being aware of the fact that intelligence is a property that can grow beyond us is a fundamental trait for survival in the information age. The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, and as we become a networked species, we’ll end up getting closer to the following question: what happens if the potential for intelligence is infinite?
